Wednesday's and Thursday's posts.

Yikes! It looks like I've been working on my story so much that I couldn't do Wednesday's post!

So, I'm doing it on Thursday.

The first one (tell a random story): Well, my mom and I were out walking, mainly to keep in shape and also to chat, which you can't do very well when your mother is painting all day and you yourself are programming/writing all day.

We were well on our trip back when a strange truck lumbered by. We figured it was a sewage truck, partly because of some distinctions on the truck, but also by what happened next.

The truck grumbled along the road, coming up to the turn. And, right in the middle of the side walk, just in front of us, out of a pipe in the back came a huge splat of number 2.

We stopped and stared.

"Is that poo?"
"Yes, I believe it is."
"I think you had better make a detour."

***

Thursday (a random act of kindness): Well, for this, I think I might go for a random act of kindness that I believe should be done. And for this, I think I need a Peanuts Without Rerun:

Friday's post (a bit late)

Well, this is a tad late, because of the absolute lack of faults this writing class bears. However, I figured I should probably to it, anyway.

The only slightest fault I can find is what Jeni said: more MIP time. However, I gotta remind myself that you had a family emergency, so that complaint instantly goes out the door. I guess I have to say what Sarah says; I just really appreciate being in this class! All of the friendly people, opportunities to flex my writing muscles, learning to tolerate carpal tunnel (just kidding), and things are just awesome.

No complaints at all!

Wow, mom! I just had the best dream ever! It was all about ___________...

...Lemons.

Favorite Article of Clothing?

Unlike other posts, this post can be summed up in one word:

BLUE!
BLUE BLUE BLUE!
Bluebluebluebluebleblueblueblueblueblue!
I don't care if it's a sweat shirt or a t-shirt or a pants or shorts or a snowsuit or shoes or a hat or my tongue after eating a bag of blueberries, just so long as it's BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE BLUE!!!!

There, I said it! *whew* Even I have a dark, secret clicheness deep down there, under the weirdness/geekinesss.

Plus, Puppy Linux keeps on working great. I'm trying to install it on another computer with only 256 megabytes of RAM, and so far, it's been great. It's also running on my super-cool "green thumb" flash drive :).

When this was a mining town...

...Well, the place would sure be very strange. The main purpose of this place would be being underground, for goodness sakes! It's a whole different world down there, below the surface. The sun never breaks through, the world only lit by the candlelights on the miner's helmets.

Read City of Ember to get a bit of idea of what that would be like. Electricity (in the old days, candles) is the one thing that keeps everyone and everything going! Half a life, always enveloped in darkness, the only bright things being the light bulbs way up there, dumbed down, thinking that Ember is the only living place... ...Jeez, I love that book! Just so... spine tingling. Should probably get around to reading the rest of People of Sparks, too. And Prophet of Yonwood, and Diamond of Darkhold.

Gotta love the Ember saga, and all of the underground-ish stuff.

Poor and Happy, Rich and Miserable?

Poor and happy is 100% the way to go for me. You see, being rich and miserable is just as useless as poor and miserable; if you're that unhappy, what good are those green slips of paper, really? Sure, they can buy you some great stuff, but to what length can this purchasing go? You can buy new cars, houses, pool tables, computers, clothes, things like that, but if you're really, truly miserable...

...you can't buy happiness. The cars are just for idle transportation, the house is just a place for you to inhabit, pool tables are simply there for the purpose of mindlessly knocking balls into pockets, computers are just there for the lights on the screen, clothes are just to keep you warm, everything just loses its appeal. There is an illusion of luxury, but it's a weak one.

Really, you aren't rich. In a ton of aspects other than money, you are broke. Terribly.

Being poor and happy is VERY much better, in my opinion. Although you are weak in one aspect (money), nothing says you can't be extremely strong in other ones. J.K. Rowling was very poor, but she was also very good at writing. She wrote Harry Potter. It was rejected by a ton of publishers, but, finally, one little company in Scotland accepted.

And what happened when people read it? They loved it! The world went Harry Potter crazy, and J.K. Rowling became the fifth richest person in England.

Poor and happy for me.

Puppy Linux Saves the Day!!!

Sooo, when Windows crashes (I'm not saying "if", because it will crash, trust me), it's nice to fall back on a subtle, relaxing OS: Linux. More specifically, Puppy Linux :)

Well, Windows was totally immobilized by several viruses in the system.

We had plan A; get some real anti-virus program up and running. Nope, the devious little bugs detected Norton 360 and stopped it cold.

Plan B: Boot into safe mode and run an anti-virus from there. But, it wouldn't even boot into safe mode, courtesy of the worms.

Plan C: Use my computer tutor's suggestion; burn a Puppy Linux disk and boot the PC from that. This one actually worked! I transfered all of the important data to a flash drive and then installed Puppy on another memory stick. Ta-dum! We're now happily running Linux!

If you wonder what Pup Linux is like, I suggest you go here: http://puppylinux.org/main/index.php?file=Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm

It has a few kinks, mind you, like having to call up a terminal and type in the name of the program you want to unpack (with a whole bunch of nerdly stuff typed around it, mind you) to decompress something, but it's worth it.

Also, when you boot up, it says "WARNING: DO NOT REMOVE USB FLASH DRIVE!", which is convenient. I wonder if I can mod it to say "WARNING: DO NOT REMOVE USB FLASH DRIVE UNLESS YOU WANT A FIST TO COME OUT FROM BEHIND THE MONITOR AND SEND YOU FLYING ACROSS THE ROOM."

Now, where would I find an inconspicuous but effective USB fist...?

Double Uggggggghhh...

Well, the Google Redirect Virus is reaching its final stages, fake anti-virus warnings popping up every thirty seconds rendering the computer nearly unusable. Phooey-phooey-phoo.

How most viruses work these days is to disguise themselves as anti-virus programs. When the person clicks "Scan for viruses", "Block Threat' or what have you, the malware unleashes its havoc across the system. And usually they try to make money in the process by having you buy their so-called "Pro" version of the software which is no better than the free one.

AV Antivirus Suite is a trap. This is NOT to be confused with AVG, which is good.
Malware Alarm is a well-known trap.

Well, we're currently been reduced to using my tiiiiiiiiiiny netbook, which, obviously, has a display so small you need a magnifying glass to read the text. Wonderful for traveling/quick note-writing, not too wonderful for everything else.

What really annoys me is that the novella I'm working on is inaccessible 'till I get a Puppy Linux CD/jump drive running on the thing, which will take a fair bit of trial and error, since I don't label my CDs after I burn them >_<. I had better do it kinda quickly, too, 'cause I need three, preferably five pages done by the sixth.

Well, m'kay, Friday's journal.

When I was little, I found a blank book. It changed my life.

It's curious; a book full of print has a small chance of changing someone's life, but a book without any writing to be seen in it has almost no chance at all, it would seem.

It would seem.

But things are not always what they seem, and that's what makes the world go 'round. In fact, the world doesn't seem to go 'round, but it does, at several hundred miles per hour.

The book did change my life. Why? Simple: it allowed me to write a story. Actually, I couldn't write. Therefore, I dictated to my mother, and she wrote it down in the little black book. The story itself was pretty much what you would expect from a six-year-old Harry Potter fan; a blunt, predictable plot, much too heavily based on HP, I used myself as the main character, things like that. However, it planted the seeds of writing in my life, which is extremely important to me.

My life would be very different if the move had never happened.

Well, Thursday's blog comes into view while traveling slowly along the gloomy Thursday morning.

The subject of today's blog is having one event hypothetically not happen in your life, and writing how it would affect how things are today.

Well, it's pretty cliche, I know, but the move from Pennsylvania to Michigan really had quite an effect.

Well, first of all, and most obvious of all, I'd still be living down in the 'ol church. It was actually a pretty nice place to live; very spacious, of course, plus several little hidden wonders about the building.

However, it was mortgaged, plus the roof was cracked pretty badly (if you took a loooooooong bamboo stick, you could chip off one-square-foot chunks of roof. Seriously.)

Second of all, we wouldn't be nearly as financially stable as we are in this little town. It's a lot better here (I can do my strange experiments on old computers, yay!)

Third and last, Michigan is just a much more enjoyable place to live. Friendly people, a beach just three miles away, cleaner air, all around great place; that's Michigan. Pennsylvania just can't compare.

All-in-all, I don't think we would be extremely happy if we had never moved. Then again, I wouldn't know, since I had never compared living in my old town to living up here.

Wednesday, Bi-daily and/or Weekly Comic Possibility?

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered the weak and weary,
My vision suddenly went bleary.

Once upon a midnight bright, (who knows who made the light),
I immediately lost all of my sight.

Once upon a time when midnight was near, when I stopped and stood and tried to peer,
There wasn't any more to hear.

Once while sitting in my swivel chair, I was bored, so I tried to recall my previous nightmare.
I looked up.
"Where am I?"
I didn't know where.

Once when I was trying to eat my food, I put the fork down and started to brood,
I wasn't in a very good mood,
And when I ponder the weak and weary,
I ponder this poor dude. (Myself.)



Plus a comic of my own creation:































Will it be daily, bi-daily, or weekly?

I dunno, really, but I'm going to try and make a series out of this. It's not drawn *terribly* well, (I did this kind of quickly), but I hope to add more texture/stuff to it soon.

My greatest fear. *shivershiver*

Well, here goes:

Flowered underpants. *shivershivershiver* Don't make me say it again! *shiver*

Ominously flowered underpaaaaaants,
Daily storms and nightly raaaaants,
I shudder to make
a staaaaaaaAAAAAAnce!

I come there and they are waiting
For my bottom to surrender...

Noooooooooooooo...

There. That's my greatest fear. *shiver!*

It was a dark and stormy night.

Actually, to be truthful, it wasn't. It was still a grey and gloomy morning when we drove to "Little Flowers", the town's haunted preschool, for some obfuscated business. My mom went in. I stayed out.

It didn't look like it was haunted at all. There was nothing much to be seen around the place; a wet, old playhouse was out in front of the building, a can of white paint was sitting to the left of the preschool, and an empty clothesline spanned one side of the property. It looked truly harmless.

But... I stiffened. Had the clothesline just... ...twitched? I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Yes. Same twitching. And...

My throat tightened, I stiffened a great deal more, and my legs began to buckle. The clothesline was inhabited after all! The fog must have cleared up a good deal, and I soon realized it was from evil emanations coming from the clothing that lived on the old, haunted piece of thread.

Underwear.

And not just any underwear.

Flowered underpants.

I was paralyzed with shock! These infamous underclothes appeared only once every century, and their victims had never lived to tell the tale.

The feared bit of fabric lifted off of the line, sending its own clothespins crashing to the ground. The area I was standing in seemed to grow smaller, and much darker as well. The sun was apparently frightened, as it abruptly went behind one of the huge, black clouds that filled the sky.

An ominous tear was made in the underpants, like a mouth. It spoke.

"State. Your. Purpose."

"I-I dunno!" I squeaked, like a mouse.

"You must have a good reason for trespassing on the property of the lord of the underwear."

I squeaked again, this time mistakable for a tiny laugh. There is only one thing to be said about this.

I shouldn't have.

The underwear seemed to grow, to expand and fill the sky. The space around me got even smaller, warped and distorted by the evil powers coming from the flowered fabric. Black clouds enveloped the sky completely, entirely silencing the sun and covering the world in shadow. The underpants leaped up to the sky and came soaring back down to the earth at lightening speed, I, its victim, jumping out of the way just in time.

"You run futilely, human. You will be obliterated unless you surrender to me."

The piece of cloth soared to the sky and back, crashing to the earth again, deadening the grass that got the full blow of its strike. On the next soar upwards, it hit me. My right leg was thrown completely off-balance, and, at the same time, a strange transformation began. The skin on the leg that it hit was warping, turning extremely pale. At first, I couldn't be sure, but to my horror, I found it to be true. Images of little red and pink flowers, barely visible but rapidly becoming clearer, were imprinted on my leg.

I was becoming a pair of flowered underpants. I was becoming one of them.

It was probably futile, but I ran anyway. I needed to get away, to rid myself of the flower-virus. But the underwear blocked me on every turn. And what were those faint spots around the area? They were more underclothes! Appearing everywhere, they covered all sides of the place, shielding every escape route possible. They were closing in on me...

"Welcome, new worker!" The voices of all the clothes boomed at the same time.

At this point, I had almost totally given in to despair. My deepest fears were closing in around me, abduction by these creatures in my imminent future. But, as the underpants slowly but steadily drew in nearer to me, I realized something:

The pot of white paint to the side of the building!

A legend from the previous century came back to me in a blur:

On a gloomy April day of 1909, a young painter was painting a large, elaborate house, with (duh) a clothesline next to it, holding a pair of flowered underwear prisoner. The underwear was quite angry, and soon broke free of its prison, threatening the painter that he should either surrender or be destroyed. The painter, however, was fearless, and he had a piece of knowledge that would soon save his life; to kill flowered underwear, you must destroy its central flower; by cutting it out, scribbling over it, or by covering it with white paint. Just as the deadly underclothes were about to strike him, he grabbed his jar of paint, very luckily happening to be white, and splattered it across his attacker's front. The underwear fell to the ground, defeated.


After the story had been processed in my head, I attempted to put it into motion. I lunged for the only remaining gap between the clothes. I got through, but barely. The phantom underpants quickly adapted to my plan, dashing in my direction, trying to stop me from reaching the bucket.

However, I reached it! I reared back, ready to hurl it at the lead underwear when - SLAM! The paint bucket was sent flying out of my hands as one of the drone underpants rammed into my arm, all of the white paint in the pot splattered across the grass! All of them, the leader and the drones, prepared for one final finishing blow.

And they made it.

I was sent flying off my feet into the picket fence, yelling. I was turning pale, unnatural...

Flowered.

The leader came forth slowly, savoring the moment. I was sitting against the fence, a look of horror on my face. But suddenly, the horror changed to a strange smirk. I had just realized: the paint isn't gone; it's out of the can! All I need to do...

In a split second, I stood up, smiled at the lead underwear, and with all my might, kicked over one of the clothesline stands.

The leader, now quite confused, fell under the force of the falling stand into the white paint. For a moment, it looked as though nothing had happened. Then it started shaking. Then warping. Then tearing. And then a monstrous noise filled the air, a scream to end all screams, roaring through the night. The leader exploded in a rain of flowers, showering everything around it with bits of fabric and petals. The minions, stunned, did the same as the lead.

I sighed, hard, and rolled around in the white paint, reversing the transformation. I sat against the fence a long while.

My mother came out. She saw the paint on the ground. She saw me. She saw the bits of fabric surrounding me.

"What happened?"

"This is the UP, mom. Weird things happen here. No one should ask that, or the answer will make their brains implode."

...

Google Redirect Virus... Uuuuugh.

Well, phooey. 'Soon as the computer gets repaired... it gets five gigs of adware on it.

***

Seriously, it doesn't have five gigs of crud installed (although the system sure runs like it), but, instead, a little INCREDIBLY annoying virus: the Google Redirect worm.

Well, basically how it works is that whenever you click on a search result of Google/Yahoo/Bing/whatever, the virus scratches its head for a second, deciding weather to let you visit the actual site (rarely) or to redirect you to a shopping/news/search site (most of the time). Plus, of course, it makes your computer lag like crazy.

There are a few solutions around. One I've tried (and failed) is to go to Start, Run, C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and see if there is more than one host listed. If there is, delete 'em all except for "127.0.0.1 localhost". But there were no extra IPs in the file, for me. Another one: a Firefox add-on called "NoRedirect" I downloaded. It worked for an hour, and then it started bouncing me off of the sites I want to visit to shopping sites again.

There are lots 'o programs to counter these things, but opposed to being recommended by many people, they are, by many people, recommended against. I dunno weather I'll be fixing the system by using these things or render the thing totally useless.

The real reason I'm worried is because it's my parent's PC. They'll kill me if I ruin it, so I've gotta be wary of what I do with their machine :/

My perfect job.

Well, I really see no means of a lengthy introduction for this one, so I'll just get straight the point.

A computer programmer.
(A writer, too, as an at-home job.)

It seems like being a programmer would just be a wonderful job. It may be quite tedious at times, true, but it's just been such a magical process to me for the past one and a half years I've been programming.

I know that, down at the core, it's just a huge string of zeros and ones, but can you really deny that, when you create a program to simulate life, in some small way, life is being created?

After all, when you think about it, we have to remember that we're machines, too. Biochemical machines, but machines nonetheless. I've rattled on about this before...

Anyway, I would just love this job. You couldn't actually make anything you want, but you could sure simulate anything you would like. Images, sounds (even smells will be coming to the world of computers soon!!!) can be virtually created. It's a truly amazing thing.

***

Well, I was thinking about when we were on the topic of staying up for 72 hours. Someone said something about having hallucinations while driving.

"Stop the car! The pigs! Watch out for the pigs!" Needless to say, there were no pigs. That's just wrong.

"If you take a 20 minute nap every five hours, you can stay awake for eleven days." Hmm, sounds interesting. May just try it.

Not part of the journal project: just something pretty disturbing that happened this afternoon.

Well, I was getting into the car to go to the ReStore to hunt for old computers (uber geek) when my mom noticed something. A dead chipmunk on the road (no tire tracks to be seen on them*, so it must have been a cat that got it). That's pretty normal. Here's what's not.

There were two seagulls near that spot. One right next to the dead chipmunk and one circling above.

The one right next to the chipmunk just casually (well, it was casual for a gull, anyway) took the little fellow in its beak and swallowed him whole.


Yikes.

Poor chipmunk...

...and heck, poor gull. With the bones and all, that bird is sure going to regret that in the morning.

---

Then again, birds are pretty used to barfing on cue. Perhaps when their stomach starts killing them, they can get rid of it.

I just hope they don't feed their children before that.

*I just refuse to call animals it. Just... ...disrespectful.

The one place in the world I would like to live.

Well, Isle Royale would be great, but reason has to prevail in this one. Isle Royale has a few serious drawbacks for all-the-time living; no electricity (solar panels can be installed, yes, but they cost a LOT), Winters to end all Winters, etc...

...soooo, I'm going to put in my second-favorite place in the world: Grand Marais. It's just a very nice place, in my opinion. It's a pretty homey part of Michigan, with a nice landscape, people, stuff like that.

I think it would be nice to buy a small house there, with a a garage to hold all of my computers/computer projects. As for the house itself, I plan for the downstairs to be mainly a writing workshop, papers strewn all over the place, notebooks, pens, pencils and an old writing computer in the living room, and old, wonderful poems on the walls of the kitchen.

The upstairs would be computer-mania; there would be a little studio to one side jam-packed with old and new systems, plus drawers galore, full of disks, cables, replacement parts, old wireless modems, general computer doodads and spare screen digitizers. To the other side, I plan for there to be my bedroom, with a small bed in the middle and a very large amount of bookshelves on every wall, with more books than you can imagine on them. To one wall, I plan for there to be a very small, very old computer just for keeping a journal and some other writing.

Just that, with little else, would be the best imaginable place to live, for me.

My favorite place.

I'm going to have to say it sooner or later: Isle Royale.

It's a beautiful little island, forty-five miles long and eight miles wide, with a little cabin (Dassler Cabin) off to the far east end of it. About five years ago, when I was six orbits of Earth around the Sun old, my parents got an artist residency to this pretty little cabin (lucky us!). We waited for months to go, but the time, at last, came. We started our trip, traveling for about three days by car, stopping at various interesting hotels along the way, six hours of traveling by ferryboat, feeling sick, playing cards and asking every five minutes "Are we there yet!?", twenty minutes by motorboat, 'till finally we found our cabin - pretty bare, I thought at first.

But the bareness soon gave way to many adventures out in the wild. We had great fun exploring the wilderness, running through the forest and many other things. Good times...

Isle Royale was pretty uninhabited; very few people lived there. That might have been a little lonely, but it wasn't, since we lived pretty close to the central point of the population, plus always playing card games together at night, etc.

We had guests during our trip, too. We met up with Nancy Clements, a good friend of ours from California, plus we met Dick and Mary, who showed us our way around the island.

After our three weeks of fun, we went home the same way we came in reverse (I barfed on the boat ride) I was pretty sad to be going home, since I really loved the cabin/Isle Royale, but I soon got over it. When we got home, I kissed the front door, kissed the dog, kissed everything I could think of; I was pretty glad to be home.

***

Well, now, five years later, we're thinking of going again in the fall. I'm pretty exited!

Translation/more Peanuts without Charlie Brown

Well, since nobody was commenting, I figured I'd better post the translation:

On May 25th, 1999, I was born in Salem, Oregon. Our house way out there was quite nice; I can't remember much of my childhood, but I can remember that much. After about five months of living there, we decided to move to Pennsylvania (and trust me, Pennsylvania is insania), since we agreed it was really no place to raise a child and, also, it was my father's home state. We were pretty happy there; it was a relatively nice climate, and the big, light grey church we lived in seemed like a bargain for $25,000... ...at the time. While we were in Pennsylvania, my interests were mainly Star Wars (the most cliche obsession of little kids) and, more, importantly, writing. I was also a big Harry Potter fan (another cliche obsession of little kids, but, IMHO, a much better one), so I decided to write a book like it (well, I didn't write it, exactly, I dictated it to my mom and she wrote it down). It was pretty primitive, and too heavily based on Harry Potter, but it was a start, anyway.

After many years of living there, the unclean environment, neighbors with thirteen barking, biting dogs and a broken roof proved too much for us, so we moved up to the UP, a much better place, we thought. It was about this time I started getting my interests turned to computers. I was fascinated by them, and, strangely enough, mostly by the old ones. I soon decided to learn how to make my own games. It wasn't easy trying to find a good programming language to use, but eventually I found Game Maker 7. I made a few small, primitive games with it, but soon after, I spent a couple year's savings on Multimedia Fusion 2 Developer. I've made many little doodads with it, none of them necessarily good, but I'm pretty sure it's sparked my future. Today, I have two equal interests: writing, and computer science. I plan to major in both, and to follow both careers.

Plus:







And:

If I could sum up my life in two paragraphs, what would it be?

Deleted this post, since it was just taking up an enormous amount of space. :)

Peanuts without Charlie Brown

I know it's not part of the assignment, but I'm posting it anyway. A thought popped into my head while Jenny was showing us "Garfield without Garfield". Why not Peanuts without Charlie Brown?

Soooooo, here it is:

Original:








Peanuts without Charlie Brown:








Weird, huh? It's supposed to be.

What animal would I be, and why?

Well, I have to say, I would like to be Heather's cat. Nooo, not the orange one, although that would be a good life. I mean the black and white one, the plump, timid, lazy one.

Think about it - you would get to lay around either in the sun or in the shade aaaaaaaaaall day, would get fed the full three meals of (to humans, not appetizing; to cats, quite appetizing) rich cat food every rotation of the earth, would be petted when YOU wanted to, and would just run off otherwise.

However, I would also like to be another one of Heather's pets.

The bird.

Think about this one: You would be fed, quite well, and, more importantly, you could taunt both of the cats! It would be quite wonderful, but there is an obvious (and pretty bad) drawback. You would only have about two square feet to move around in.

Therefore, I think I'll stay with wanting to be the cat. Freedom is vitally important to me, and, since the cat has a whole house to move about in as opposed to the bird who is greatly limited, that black and white fluff puff is my first choice.